07 July, 2012, 06:04:13 AM

Hey fellas, i tried to do alot of searching before i posted this, and none of the posts really answered a question for me.

Let me explain my situation, like many of you here, I'm an audiophile and prefer having my entire collection in loss-less for archiving. all i have is FLAC files. I have a very nice custom sound system in my vehicle and a nice home theater, and I'd like to have retail quality cd's with it.

I want to burn loss-less CD's, following redbook standards, so essentially i want a retail quality cd on a burned cd.

Here's my question, programs such as cdburnerxp where you just drag and drop the files, and click burn at this point you'll see something like "adding files to image" or something along that line, is programs like cdburnerxp actually burning the files into a retail quality cd. or does it convert the files to mp3 and burn, this question applies to other software like burrrn, nero b-rom, et cetera.

Also is there a way to figure out how to match checksums? for example match track md5's to burned track's md5?

if so then wouldn't that be able to tell you if whatever program is really burning a loss-less cd, because you could re-rip, and have the exact same filesize, and even better yet, checking burned tracks in something like audacity to match waveforms with original flac.

How about CD-Text, does this affect a lossles burn?

I'm sorry if posted this in the wrong section, i did try searching up to on previous threads, but none really answered the question.

Here's my question, programs such as cdburnerxp where you just drag and drop the files, and click burn at this point you'll see something like "adding files to image" or something along that line, is programs like cdburnerxp actually burning the files into a retail quality cd. or does it convert the files to mp3 and burn, this question applies to other software like burrrn, nero b-rom, et cetera.

Of course they do not add an unnecessary, time-consuming, and complete illogical step of converting to a lossy format. Why would they?

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Also is there a way to figure out how to match checksums? for example match track md5's to burned track's md5?

if so then wouldn't that be able to tell you if whatever program is really burning a loss-less cd, because you could re-rip, and have the exact same filesize, and even better yet, checking burned tracks in something like audacity to match waveforms with original flac.

Yes, just burn and re-rip with offset correction enabled in both cases and compare MD5s. Manually matching (I presume you mean inverting and mixing) the waveforms is unnecessary, considering the rarity of a false positive from matching MD5s.

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How about CD-Text, does this affect a lossles burn?

No. That is not part of the main audio stream. So, like all other non-audio data, it has no effect upon the audio.

Thanks for answering my questions, i'm not too familiar with how many of the softwares today work.

How about this, why do the tracks lose their metadata when burned, unless you enable cd-text, which is just tracknames correct? Is there a way to keep all the meta data from the flac's to the burned cd?

I'm sorry if my questions are a bit noobie, but hey all of us start somewhere

Does every original CD or DVD (the said retailer quality) have loss-less audio? If an original CD/DVD (from retailer) contains music in lossy format (MP3) to begin with, it will be pointless to rip it in loss-less format (FLAC) right?So, how do we determine what format (FLAC, WAV or lossy MP3) is actually used in an audio cd/dvd?If we can do this, we can rip the exact same copy and format of the music recorded in the music studio right?Now that leads to another question: Since people often use FLAC as loss-less format, I'm assuming most recording studio use this?

Does every original CD or DVD (the said retailer quality) have loss-less audio?

They should so long as the retailer and studio are trustworthy. It's not unheard of for a retail CD to be sourced from lossy files though. In those cases it's a terrible screw up on their part or they are unscrupulous.

Now that leads to another question: Since people often use FLAC as loss-less format, I'm assuming most recording studio use this?

Nope. Most recording studios use PCM formats since they require the least processing power to work with.People use compressed lossless (FLAC, etc) to preserve the audio quality of the original CD while saving storage space.

All redbook audio CDs are the same data format. Looking at the optical disk with Windows Explorer will let you see if there are FLAC, mp3, wma, or anything else on it. If so, it is not actually an audio CD, it is just a CD disk with audio in some other format. It will not play in a regular CD player but may work fine in a DVD player.

If it isn't a audio CD, you want to simply COPY to HD suing Windows Explorer. Only audio CDs need extracting with programs such as EAC.

If you extract to lossless (wav, FLAK, etc.) you will get exactly what is on the CD. If you extract to a lossy format you will get a modified copy of what is one the CD. This is the case regardless of whether or not the CD was prepared from a lossless or lossy source. Even if the CD's source was lossy, lossless extraction will prevent further modification or the data, lossy will change it.

Also is there a way to figure out how to match checksums? for example match track md5's to burned track's md5?

foobar2000 with the bitcompare feature. However: you need to get write offset right, otherwise the bitstream will move some steps to the left or right.

Is EAC the only software that gives the user the ability to change the write offset? If yes, why don't foobar2000 and dBpoweramp add this feature?

You can mount your image into a virtual drive which fully supports cue + flac/ape files (newer versions of Daemon Tools), and rip from virtual drive applying the write offset of your writer. Then, you will have a image with write offset corrected previously, and you can burn this image using conventional programs.

Or you can encode temporaly a set of files for burning using CueTools, which features the ability to enter a write offset correction value, and burn from that set of files.